Activism for working folk.

2013.10.27

Penny rants: concerning gay rights and health care.

Holy crap does Michigan Governor Rick Snyder ever sidestep a question about whether firing someone because they're gay is discrimination -- three times, and I'm not counting "that's not a hypothetical" and "you're not going to lead" as two more only because they don't actually end with a question mark. Worse than that, though, is the House Speaker's hack telling us that "(n)o one has yet come up with a good answer on how to balance personal liberty with religious freedom." "No one"? I sure hope he means "no one" in the Michigan state legislature, because the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been a "good answer" for over a decade now (of course, Congress still needs to pass it). More likely, though, I think he means that the only answer he'll accept as a "good answer" is the one that allows religious bigots to enforce their bigotry on everyone else. I'm pretty sure that's their definition of a "balance" between "personal liberty" and "religious freedom," anyway.

Meanwhile, Mike Konczal asks if the disastrous-so-far rollout of healthcare.gov presents "a problem for liberalism" -- does it "discredit the core goals of a liberal project"? Short answer: no. And not merely because this is a right-wing health care plan put forth by a Democrat: just because a government does something incompetently doesn't mean a government should never do anything, and anyone who thinks so has blocked out the entire Bush Administration, which usually went out of its way to do nothing and usually did worse than nothing. Philosophically, we should always demand that our government do things right, whether we're liberals or conservatives, and certainly no liberal should feel compelled to defend incompetence because it comes from a Democrat. We might well conclude (as Mr. Konczal does) that the ACA is rolling out so badly because it's not liberal enough -- Medicare-for-all wouldn't have these problems, after all.

Alec Mento's *Penny Rants* books help you relive the horrors of the last 14 years of American politics, but with an improbable optimism and (per Kirkus Reviews) an "acerbic flair" and "a talent for distilling complex ideas into quickly digestible parts." And you can only get these books at Blunt Instruments; click the photo above (or type blunteye.com into your browser) to get them!